Public Safety Committee on April 30th, 2013

[D/Commr Doug Lang]

No. There's a big investment that has to go into that now. Each province and territory is a little bit different. I think there are three or four different models on the accommodation program, how they're going to do it. Some are paying more up front now; some are stretching it out over the 20 years of the contract, but with an idea of replacing a detachment every five years on average, so we lower that number.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

I was curious about your comments about broadband. We've heard that before, certainly in isolated areas. I live 30 minutes from Thunder Bay and I don't have any Internet. It's not just far north isolated areas we're talking about.

What needs to be done in relation to that kind of technology to make the RCMP's job easier and safer, and to do the crime work and police work you need to do? Would you be saving money if broadband were there, if we're just going to talk about money, for example?

[D/Commr Doug Lang]

I believe so, but it's a much bigger picture than that for us. We have radio systems that need replacing in a number of the provinces and territories across Canada. That's another line on the budget sheet that somebody has to address one day. The Internet and the broadband issues in a detachment affect the way we roll things out. We've come up with the solution that people shouldn't just develop these things thinking everybody has high-speed Internet. Now that we have our training people thinking that way, they're developing a second option, a CD option, for us. Our problem in most of these communities is that we have satellite communication that not only runs the Internet in our office, but also our Internet for the CPIC system, our file management system, and all those kinds of things. If you have a member sitting in the detachment using the computer for an online course, the guy next to him can't do a query to see if somebody has a criminal record.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

My time is limited so I want to move over to volunteers and auxiliary, which you mentioned briefly in your opening remarks.

Is there a line that you won't cross in terms of using that kind of staff allotment in replacing officers? Is there a cut-and-dried point where you won't use them? There might be pressure to use auxiliary or volunteers for something, but in some cases you would say that you need an officer.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

A very quick response, please.

[D/Commr Doug Lang]

We will not put a volunteer in the line of danger. We will use auxiliaries and volunteers for some kinds of traffic control and scene control, but we would never put them in a position where they would be brought near some kind of threat.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

We'll go to Mr. Hawn.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and my thanks to the deputy commissioner, and almost superintendent Tyler Bates for being here.

I have spent a little bit of time in the north in places like Yellowknife, Inuvik, and Iqaluit, and have interacted with some of your folks. It is a challenging environment and I really admire the work that you guys do.

It's not their role to be involved in policing, but do you have any coordination with the Canadian Rangers in any of your work? They have some training that might be of assistance from time to time.

[D/Commr Doug Lang]

Yes, we call on them for backup response, search and rescue activities, and other things of that kind in the north. They like to volunteer their services. As you know, sometimes that's not a good thing. It's supposed to come the other way around. They're a great asset to us.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

There are a lot of unique challenges in the north, but the front end is relatively simple. When you get somebody you need to process through the system, what special challenges do you have in the north with respect to the justice system, judges, courts, and so on? How do you deal with those?

[D/Commr Doug Lang]

There are two of which I'm acutely aware.

One is our ability to keep up with feeding the criminal record system in Ottawa. We've changed from a system of paper-based fingerprint submissions on a criminal record, where if you went to court and were convicted of something we'd have to type out at the bottom of your fingerprints what you're convicted of, put that in the mail, send it to Ottawa, and it would work its way through the system. Now we're going to digital-based Livescan machines, where it's done electronically and fed into the system electronically. Unfortunately these machines cost about $50,000 a piece, and we can't afford to put one in a three-person detachment that's going to have five or six fingerprint submissions over the course of a year to send in. We've coordinated that centrally in Whitehorse, Yellowknife, and Iqaluit. The outlying detachment sends those things into the centre and then they're sent electronically to Ottawa. That causes a little bit of a delay. I've had some discussions with public prosecutions in the last month or so on how we can speed that up. It seems that the regular repeat offenders are getting into the system again before their criminal records catch up with them. We're working on that one and we believe we have a solution.

The other one is the court requirements. I think you heard about it from Chief Knecht from Edmonton when he was here. We have court requirements for our members to attend. They show up in court only to have the accused not show up. We have video facilities in the north for video appearances, video bail hearings, etc., but when it's not used or when it's used improperly, or not taken advantage of, or there are games played with it, problems are caused for the whole system. We can have no members in court waiting on such and such a hearing, but if the defence counsel says he wants to wait and see the whites of all the witnesses' eyes before he decides to plead guilty or not, it's a problem. But it's part of the system.

I don't know what more can be done to push or facilitate that. The system is in place. We try to use it. We used it successfully in Manitoba when I was there, and it saved a lot on bail hearings and show cause hearings.

If witnesses come down to the south for whatever reason and we have to haul them back north, the cost to Canada is huge, especially if we're hauling witnesses around for trials that never materialize.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you.

What's the difference, grosso modo, in the level of training for your aboriginal community constable relative to a regular force member?

[Insp Tyler Bates]

It's a 21-week program. It's only a few weeks shy of the full training for an RM.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Is this done in Regina?

[Insp Tyler Bates]

It is done in Regina, yes.

It's a specialty really. It's a focus on community engagement and crime prevention.

As was mentioned, they do have the tactical capacity to support our membership. They receive all the same firearms training, and all the same police operations training, as far as motor vehicles are concerned. They're highly trained and highly skilled, but they have a cultural competence that we need in service in our aboriginal communities.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Do they have full authority just like any other member?

[Insp Tyler Bates]

That's correct. The portion of the training that they don't complete has to do with the paper aspect of the job, core package completion, search warrant completion, and the like.

The intent is that they're visible in the community, that they're not sitting at a terminal with a slow line speed trying to get all the data entered into our records management system. They're on the road and they're visible. They're engaging with youth, participating in cadet corps and activities such as those.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Do you have a pure number or percentage of how many of these community constables there are in the north, as a percentage of the total force?

[Insp Tyler Bates]

We're in the infancy of this program right now. It's a pilot project, and at this juncture we actually only have six aboriginal community constables. We're now in the process of recruitment for our second phase of this pilot. Being that the pilot group is as small as it is, we still have to undertake an assessment of that program, subsequent to the second troop.

We're looking at a fall troop in October, and we're in the process of recruitment for that. We're anticipating that this troop will be significantly larger than the first. Subsequent to that, we'll hopefully be able to undertake an assessment of its value.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Are they trained as a separate troop in Regina? Is some of the training integrated with other troops, or is it all troop by troop?

[Insp Tyler Bates]

They are a separate troop; they're a distinct troop, but certainly a number of their training components have no variance from what a regular member goes through.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

It's probably too early to say because of the infancy of the program, but is there any estimate of the cost of one of those community constables versus the cost of a regular force officer?

[D/Commr Doug Lang]

That's a great question, because in terms of the savings that we saw from this from the start there's about a $12,000 difference in salary between an aboriginal community constable and regular constable, so there was a savings there. We hired directly from the community. We looked to pull Laurie out of community X, and then put him back into community X where he already had a house, where he already some....

We don't have extra infrastructure in these communities. That's why it takes us so long to move ahead. We can't build a house on spec.

It was great for us. We got seven—I think we started with seven—people back into communities where we needed linguistic capability and cultural sensitivity in there, where they already had their own infrastructure.

The things we're learning as we move forward is that now they're saying, “Where's my house?” They get all the other benefits that come with being an RCMP member, but they're already starting to ask some of those questions, and they're asking how long they have to do this before they get a chance to become a regular Mountie guy.

We're changing the program a little bit in the next little while to change it from an aboriginal community constable focus to just a community constable focus. We have some other communities in Canada, in the Lower Mainland for example, where they want to get their culturally competent person with linguistic capability back in to stay there for a while.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much. We're out of time here.

Mr. Scarpaleggia, please. You have seven minutes.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

I would like to get an overview, because there are many different concepts that have been discussed, such as the first nations police force, and the volunteer and auxiliary members.

Does every community have at least one RCMP officer? Or would every division in the north, which could comprise more than one community, have a regular RCMP officer in place? In some cases do they instead have a first nations police constable or some other type of constable? Is that how it works?

Could you just give me an idea, a broad-brush structural view of how all of this works?